


Flannel Interruption

by tatooedlaura



Series: Life [10]
Category: The X-Files
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-10
Updated: 2016-11-10
Packaged: 2018-08-30 03:02:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8516023
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tatooedlaura/pseuds/tatooedlaura
Summary: Every day domesticity and familial responsibility wins out over oddly sensual rubbing of pajama-clad limbs every time ...





	

She slept solid until 3am, which, given he’d gotten to her apartment to find her asleep at 2pm, he found highly impressive, even for her. He’d puttered around the place while she snored, cleaned up the kitchen, doing the load of laundry jammed to overflowing in the hamper, ate a few times, napped long and deep in the recliner chair diagonal from the couch.

 

He’d burned through hours of old Jeopardy episodes that were playing on some forgotten back-end cable channel he hadn’t known she received and would now be fighting to watch whenever he had the chance. He was sure he could beat her at Jeopardy, there was a really good chance he could beat her at Jeopardy … hell, he would probably be buried into the ground by her rapid-fire answering during Jeopardy but he wouldn’t mind it.

He liked watching his girl be all geeky and super smart and ‘I’ll kick your ass with half my brain tied behind my back’. One of these decades, he might even work up the nerve to tell her that, too.

Either way, he’d had a pretty damn good day being some twisted version of house-husband to his unconscious albeit drugged up partner.

But now it was shadowed and heavy and warm and secretive and cozy, Mulder settled on the end of the couch, Scully’s feet on his lap, TV quiet, lights off. He had woken up about twenty minutes earlier and chosen to enjoy the darkness, hand on Scully’s ankle, occasionally higher when the mood struck. Not sure if he was the one to wake her or if it was simply her body telling her 13 hours was enough, he still jumped a little when her voice drifted towards him, “please tell me that’s you down there, Mulder.”

“It’s me.” Tightening his grip on her delicate bones, “how are you doing?”

“I have no idea. The room isn’t rotating but it’s dark and I don’t understand why.”  
Rolling his head to speak towards her instead of the corner of the room, he kept his voice quiet, hating to break the acoustical honestly of the space, “you finally fell asleep earlier in the afternoon and it’s now about 3am.”

“I slept for 13 hours?”

“Glad to see you have returned to the land of the living with your mental capacities intact.”

Still foggy on several aspects of the last half-day, “did I call you? A lot?”

“A few times.”

The thought hung there for a minute or two, then, “I remember something about crackers.”

“Yes. There were crackers involved but it was fine. I enjoyed the distraction. One can only take Walter Skinner droning for so long.”

“Oh, God, Skinner heard my calls?”

He decided that sparing her brute force honesty was the best policy at the moment, “not really. I kept my voice down and there were a couple other agents in there at times as well.”

Repeating her previous invocation to the big guy in the sky, “did you at least tell Skinner I was drugged?”

By now, his hand had drifted up to her knee, tracing a circle around the edges of her kneecap, “yeah and then we finished and he kicked me out, telling me, and I quote, ‘You are not real productive’ meaning me, ‘without her’ meaning you, ‘and she can’t function in the world without you. You two are a complete mess alone so get out and don’t come back until there are two of you’ end quote.”

Scully sat with this for a few seconds, “well, actually, if you think about it, that’s probably one of the most accurate descriptions of us I’ve ever heard.”

Letting a chuckling whoosh of breath out, she could hear him smiling widely, “yeah it is.”

Silence settled again, Scully’s toes beginning a soft massage of his thigh as Mulder’s thumb continued its trek around her patella, drifting occasionally higher or lower unconsciously. He was entertaining thoughts of moving higher still when Scully pushed her toes into him extra hard, “Mulder?”

“Yeah.”

“Can you help me up so I can go to the bathroom?”

Every day domesticity and familial responsibility wins out over oddly sensual rubbing of pajama-clad limbs every time, “yup. How’s the back feeling?”

“I don’t know yet. Laying here, I feel pretty good but not sure how stiff the muscles are until I actually try to use them. I don’t want to pull something I don’t have to.”

As he gently removed her feet from him, then stood, he leaned back over to assist her sitting up, “those last two sentences were fairly dirty, just saying.”

Moving extremely slow, she made it upright with only a few twinges, “we’ll return to that topic when I get back.”

“Looking forward to it.”

She made it there and back on her own, walking slow but steady, soft steps trumping jarring, quick ones. Finding Mulder sitting lightly on the arm of the couch, blankets arranged along the back of it so they could easily be pulled over her if she chose to lay back down. Stopping in front of him, she eyed his silhouette and noticed the outline of his lips curved into what had to be a smile, “that was much easier than I thought.”

The smile got wider, “that’s good. Maybe you’re healing up.”

Raising her hand enough to point behind him to the cushions, “is it safe to assume you’ll help my lie back down?”

“That’s what I’m waiting here for.”

“Good. My head still feels a little odd and horizontal felt better.”

“Understood.” Sooner, they were both settled back in, blankets covering them, feet back against thigh and hand back on knee. “Now, weren’t we returning to the topic of dirty sentences?”

Scully grinned into her pillow, “sshhh, Mulder. I’m enjoying the darkness.”

Beginning his massage of her joint once again, “never thought I’d hear you say that.”

“Some darks can be nice.”

Nice, indeed. Scully’s toes began their kneading of his muscles again and given the dark was the dark and darkness holds boldness that light chases away, Mulder’s hand drifted centimeter by centimeter north of her knee, sliding slowly up her thigh until he found the upswell of her hip and the edge of her flannel pants. Once there, he worked his way back down, enjoying the trek thoroughly.  
Feeling her muscles contract and loosen with each movement of her foot against him, he sometimes ceased his travels, feeling her shift under his palm, relishing every nerve in his body being acutely aware of the warm woman against him. Without realizing it, “you are perfect.”

Voice cracking under the pressure of his touch, “I am far from perfect, Mulder.”

Sliding palm up and over her hip to the valley of her waist, he slipped his hand under the edge of her shirt to feel hot skin against his, “you are perfect to me and that’s all that matters.”

How had she survived all these years without him touching her like this? It was a drug 10x more powerful that the stuff in her prescription bottle. Desperately wanting to move her foot back against him, feel his reaction to her, she refrained, not sure her overloaded and overtaxed body could take that right now.  
She did, however, move her arm to lie along her side, her hand first covering, then wrapping over his, “even when I call you about crackers?”

He knew an evasion tactic when he heard it but he didn’t mind, given she didn’t seem to have any intention of letting him go or of stopping her footsie playing with his thigh, “even when you get stuck in the bathroom in the dark.”

“What?!”

Moment ruined but knowing she loved him anyways, he chortled, “you don’t remember the bathroom?”

“Oh, God.”

He briefly filled her in, leaning more in her direction with every sentence, until finally, he somehow shifted, settling his head on her thigh just below her hip, the afghan cushioning him against the bone. Obligingly, she pulled up her knees, reluctantly leaving his leg in favor of calves against his chest and his one hand against the backs of her thighs while the other wrapped around the front of her leg, palm to flannel and fingers tucked under against the cushions.

She also decided that in lieu of toes on leg, she had the right to put fingers to hair and she did so, twining them through his tousled, brown wildness, massaging his scalp at random moments when it struck her fancy.

“Scully?”

“Yeah?”

“Can we stay like this?”

Hearing the dulcet, sleepy tones laced in his innocently beautiful words, she closed her eyes, happiness settling to the marrow of her bones, “forever, Mulder. We can stay like this forever.”

As he drifted to sleep, he hugged her legs closer, his last, fractured thought being that one day, he’d like to do this without the flannel interruption.

At the end of the couch, Scully contemplated the same thing as she settled in, wide awake and still, not wanting to move, not wanting to disturb the breathtaking man wrapped around her.


End file.
